Some Actors Outraged by Kazan Honor

NEW YORK (AP) -- Phoebe Brand cannot excuse Elia Kazan. She
cannot forget that nearly 47 years ago, the great director named
names.

She cannot forget because hers was one of those names.
``I forgive,'' she says. ``I forgive a lot, but I don't think I
can forgive Kazan.''

When Kazan told a congressional committee that Miss Brand had
been a member of the Communist Party, he punched her ticket for the
blacklist. Forty years would pass before the actress would appear
in a film.

But at that same moment, Kazan sealed his own fate. For the rest
of his life, Kazan would be known as Broadway's best director -- AND
as a McCarthy-era Judas. He would be remembered for films like ``On
the Waterfront'' and ``East of Eden'' -- AND for destroying
colleagues' careers.

He is 89 years old now. Next Sunday night his own career will be
crowned with a signal honor, an Academy Award for lifetime
achievement. But the honor has been overshadowed by screams of
outrage.

``Age and ability in the arts or anything else, in my opinion,
does not excuse a crime,'' says Rod Steiger, star of ``On the
Waterfront.''

``Sometimes the good guys win,'' rejoins Charleton Heston.

Usually, the lifetime achievement award is a deathless pause in
the Oscars' relentless pageant of glitz.

But this year will be different. Expect protests and
counter-demonstrations, lusty cheers and stone silence -- all
because of something that happened before many of us were born, at
a time when Americans hated and feared the Soviet Union, a country
that no longer exists.

More than any other figure who testified, Kazan remains a
lightning rod for those who despise what happened in those days,
even as others applaud him as a truth-telling hero.

Why?

Because a half-century after America went on a hunt for
Communists in its government, its media and all its closets, the
hunt -- and the fruits of that hunt -- remain a matter of contention.
And because Kazan was the most celebrated witness to give the House
Committee on Un-American Activities what it wanted.

``In my opinion, he was the best director of the theater in my
time,'' says playwright Arthur Laurents, himself a victim of the
blacklist.

Kazan brought ``Death of a Salesman'' and ``A Streetcar Named
Desire'' to the stage and continued to direct the best work of two
titans, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. He won praise for
films like ``A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,'' and an Oscar for
``Gentleman's Agreement.''

``Every play of worth intended for Broadway was offered me
first. I had to shrug them off,'' Kazan recalled in ``A Life,'' his
1988 autobiography. ``In films it was only a matter of what I
wanted to do, name it.''

If he was at the top of the entertainment world, he wasn't born
anywhere near it. He came into this world as Elia Kazanjioglou, and
arrived in the United States from Turkey when he was 4. Always, he
wrote in his memoirs, he has felt like an outsider.

Kazan rejected the life his father expected of him: working at
the family carpet company. Instead, he wound up at Yale Drama
School, and then at New York's Group Theatre.

The Group was devoted to performing new plays that turned a
penetrating light on American life. Its leaders were Harold Clurman
and Lee Strasberg, perhaps two of the most influential figures in
the history of the American theater.

It was Kazan who shouted ``Strike!'' at the end of Clifford
Odets' ``Waiting for Lefty,'' a 1935 play about a taxi drivers'
walkout. The audience roared ``Strike!'' in response -- an
electrifying, legendary moment.

By this time, Kazan was a member of the Communist Party -- there
was and is no law against it -- and he was not alone among members
of the Group. In his book, he said there was a cell that met on
Tuesday nights in actor Joseph Bromberg's dressing room.

According to Kazan, the success of ``Waiting for Lefty''
encouraged party leaders to take a stronger hand. They told Kazan
to inform the cell that it must lead other actors in an
insurrection, taking control of the Group from its directors.

Kazan says he did as he was told, but then told the cell that he
disagreed with the plan. The party pressured Kazan to change his
mind.

Instead, he quit. He had been a member for less than two years,
from the summer of 1934 to the spring of 1936.

So much changed in the next 16 years. The Depression ended,
taking with it many of the radical impulses of a nation in peril.
And with World War II and its aftermath, feelings toward the Soviet
Union evolved from suspicion to camaraderie to enmity.

The blacklist began in 1947 when hearings into Communist
involvement in the film industry led to contempt charges against
the Hollywood Ten, screenwriters who would not answer the
committee's questions.

Your career could be destroyed because you refused to talk, or
because you were named as a party member, or because ``Red
Channels'' or some other publication reported that you were
politically suspect.

``It was a nightmare, it was, and even as I talk to you about it
now, I can feel my body being disturbed,'' says Betsy Blair Reisz.

Mrs. Reisz, first wife of actor Gene Kelly, was listed in ``Red
Channels'' though she was not a Communist.

At Kelly's insistence, she was given a major part in the movie
``Marty,'' for which she received an Oscar nomination, but that was
just a chink in the blacklist. Aside from one B movie in 1959,
Hollywood shunned her. She moved to France, then England making
films in Europe.

``It knocked people out of the box for 15 years,'' says Victor
Navasky, editor of ``The Nation'' and author of ``Naming Names.''

In January 1952, Kazan testified before the House committee.
Yes, he said, he had been a Communist. No, he said, he would not
name others he knew to be members of the party.

Four months later, he did just that.

What happened in the meantime? Kazan, in his book, said that
producer Darryl Zanuck's pleas did not move him to name names;
instead, he said he came to realize that he no longer agreed with
the Communist program, and he abhorred the party's stealth.

And so he named:

Lewis Leverett. Joseph Bromberg. Phoebe Brand and her husband,
Morris Carnovsky. Odets. Paula Miller (Lee Strasberg's wife). Art
Smith. And others he knew who were not members of the Group
Theatre.

Most, if not all, had been named by others. Bromberg had died
that year; he was already blacklisted, and had gone to London for
work despite a weak heart. Kazan said he and Odets had agreed to
name each other.

Kazan testified in executive session. The next day, the
committee released his testimony. And the day after that, Kazan
placed an ad in The New York Times -- a defiant explanation of what
he had done, written by his wife, Molly, under his name.

``Secrecy serves the Communists,'' the statement insisted. ``At
the other pole, it serves those who are interested in silencing
liberal voices. The employment of good liberals is threatened
because they have allowed themselves to become associated with or
silenced by the Communists.

``Liberals must speak out.''

The response was immediate. Old friends -- friends who knew him
by his nickname, ``Gadg,'' short for ``Gadget'' -- cut him dead,
turning their heads when they saw him on the street. The statement
in the Times didn't mollify them; it infuriated them.

Actor Karl Malden gave him tickets for his new play, ``The
Desperate Hours.'' He also gave tickets to actor Sam Jaffe, but
when Jaffe learned that Kazan would be sitting in the same row, he
canceled his plans.

When Tony Kraber, a fellow member of the Group, was called to
testify, he was asked if Kazan's testimony was accurate.

``Is this the Kazan who signed a contract for $500,000 the day
after he gave names to the committee?'' Kraber replied.

Kazan denied it. But even if it wasn't true, Kazan's detractors
said, he was wealthy and could have lived well without the movies.
He could have hewed to the stage, where no blacklist existed.
``Also,'' says Arthur Laurents, ``he was in a very strong
position. ... He could have made the committee look bad.''

Says Navasky: ``He was at the top of his form when he was
called, and people felt if he couldn't resist, how could they?''

Also, he was known as a director with a social conscience,
creator of such films as ``Gentleman's Agreement,'' which condemned
anti-Semitism. ``He was thought to be a man of moral fiber,'' says
Navasky, so many on the left were shocked at what they considered a
betrayal of friends and colleagues, and his reasons are disputed to
this day.

``He DIDN'T name everyone in the cell,'' says Patrick
McGilligan, co-author of ``Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the
Hollywood Blacklist.''

``He named the people he didn't like. He named the people who he
felt condescended to him. ... He was a cutthroat guy.''

To many on the right, Kazan acted as a hero.

``The villains and victims have been inverted. The Communists
should have apologized. They should have been charged with
treason,'' says Scott McConnell, a spokesman for the Ayn Rand
Institute who is organizing counter-demonstrations in Los Angeles
to support Kazan on Oscar night.

McConnell insists that Communists did subvert films, both with
overt propaganda in movies like ``Mission to Moscow'' and ``Song of
Russia,'' and with other movies that glorified self-sacrifice and
collective work.

Nonsense, says Laurents, whose newest play, ``Jolson Sings
Again,'' is the story of a director who informs. ``Nobody has been
able to point to one movie that was propaganda for the Soviet
Union.''

As for the Group Theatre, ``it was not political. Everyone tried
to make it seem so, and it was not,'' says Phoebe Brand.
It is an argument that is still played out in any discussion of
the Red Scare. American Communists were subversive agents of
Stalin, says one side. No, says the other: They were well-meaning
Social Democrats, though perhaps they were naive.

For some, the argument is an unending loop, and they cannot bear
to discuss it or Kazan any longer.
``I won't talk about that. Not a word. It makes me sick,'' says
Jules Dassin, the director who fled to Greece when he was
blacklisted.

``No, I can't talk about it,'' says Karl Malden, who as a member
of the Academy's board proposed the lifetime achievement award for
Kazan.

Kazan himself is not talking. He told his story in ``A Life,''
and some would say he told it in ``On the Waterfront,'' in which
informing is a virtue. His lawyer, Floria V. Lasky, says he will
not apologize when he receives the award. ``Apologize for what?''
she asks.

Eric Bentley believes Kazan deserves the honor, and he thinks
the firestorm he must endure is unfair. The Communists were shifty,
he says, and Kazan acted out of principle.
Bentley didn't always feel that way. Once, he wrote a play --
``Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?'' -- in which Kazan was one of
the villains. Relations between the two men were less than
friendly.

Recently, he encountered Kazan at a gathering at cartoonist Al
Hirschfeld's place. Someone who was unaware of their history tried
to introduce them.

Kazan is ``quite coherent when he speaks ... (but) his brain is
somewhere else a lot of the time now,'' Bentley says.
``He put his arms around me, which is pretty hard to do, because
he's a lot shorter than I am. And he said, `Eric, we always got
along fine, we did.' And I thought, `No, we didn't.' But I didn't
say anything.''